Why Karna remains our favourite mythological character

Recently there was a poll in my mythology class on the most favourite mythological character. And the result came as no surprise! It was Karna, the half- brother of the Pandavas and the eldest of Kunti’s sons who was voted the most favourite by the discerning students of mythology.

But, why? What is  it about Karna that endears him to everybody?

Is it because he was a brave and skilled archer, a great warrior? Which he was, but so was Arjuna, who according to the epic was the better archer of the two. In fact, through the epic, Karna could never defeat Arjuna, whereas Arjuna defeated Karna many times, even without the help of Krishna.

Or, can Karna’s popularity be linked to his famed generosity, for, he would never deny anyone anything, even if it meant staking his life to oblige? Maybe. But then Puru, Bhageertha and Bheeshma of the Kuru clan too have an equally strong, if not better, track record of magnanimity.

Or, was it his unflinching loyalty to his friend, Duryodhana, even it meant certain defeat and death at the hands of the Pandavas?

Or, is Karna’s popularity attributable to the fact that he was a tragic victim of a young unwed mother’s act of desperation that denied him forever the royal lineage that he well and truly deserved?

I guess most of us would go with some or all of the above. As for me, I’d bet on the last.

To me, Karna is the archetype tragic hero whom we Indians love to grieve for.

Our obsession with Karna also shows in the movie personas we Indians adore, be it the Vijay of Deewar, Vijay (yet again!) of Agnipath (old) or Shakthivelu of Nayakan (Dayavan).

All these heroes either have a childhood tragedy that somehow pushes them into wrong company, which eventually becomes their nemesis, or they become martyrs on the altar of fraternal affinity, as was the case with Govind of Khuddar.

More importantly, circumstances pitch these heroes and their mothers on opposing sides of a conflict.  And conflict  with one’s own mother is the ultimate tragedy for Indians, especially males, who crave for maternal attention and approval all their lives.

Karna is rejected by Draupadi too in her Swayamvar, where she cites his lowly status as a disqualification for his candidature as a prospective groom.   In some versions of the epic, more pathos gets added to Karna’s life when, after his marriage, his wife too refuses to accept him because of his lowly social status.

Spurned by the two key women of his life and cursed by his guru, Karna’s life assumes the proportions of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Interestingly, like all the heroes of a Shakespearean tragedy Karna’s character too had a fatal flaw. And that was ‘status anxiety’ as Gurucharan Das labels it in his book on the epic, The Difficulty of Being Good.   In order to gain the elevated status that was denied to him by his mother, Karna ended up siding the wrong team in the war, and for this and this act alone he gets further and further embroiled into the vicious web of hatred and vendetta.

On the battlefield, while Dronacharya himself transgresses the code of conduct imposed by his caste with impunity (a Brahmin was disallowed from taking up arms), and so does Kripacharya, ironically, Karna, who is a Kshatriya by birth, is discouraged from doing the same on the basis of his supposed varnashrama dharma.

And lastly, while we like our heroes to win and live, we are morbidly happier when they die. Only in death are they deified. If Karna had lived, would we have been the hero of our hearts as he is now? Maybe not, for only in his death does he gain the status of a martyr.

That leads us to an interesting question, “what if Kunti had not abandoned Karna as a child?”. How would this change the plot of the epic as we know it?   Well, that is the subject of another post….